Lithuania ranked 23rd in the final index.
The investigation was carried out in 65 countries, covering a population of over 5.5 billion people. The research team ranked countries by the speed of internet connectivity, its affordability, cybersecurity, the availability of data protection laws and e-government services, and more.
"Today, our lives are profoundly affected by our digital well-being as over half of the entire population is using the internet. We wanted to understand what matters most for people in the digital sphere and compare digital experiences around the world," says Goddy Ray, DQL research lead at Surfshark. "This is the first attempt to estimate the quality of our digital lives, which, we expect, will provide grounds for further discussions within the indexed countries."
One of the key global findings of the DQL study is that well-developed internet infrastructure does not necessarily guarantee high quality of digital life countries citizens as a composition of less tangible factors such as country’s cybersecurity or presence of personal data protection laws is essential to determine digital well-being.
The research concluded that none of the indexed countries crossed the threshold of 0.8000 (of 1.000), highlighting that there is room for improvement in various digital areas globally. The median value of DQL index is 0.6110.
The research team analyzed open-source data collected from the databases of the United Nations, the World Bank, Freedom House, the International Communications Union and other sources. The countries were ranked combining factors such as internet connection speed, affordability, cybersecurity, the availability of data protection laws, e-government services, and entertainment content availability.